From Me to We

Carol came to visit last week.  She brought food and friendship, following my hospital stay. She is not alone. We’ve received salads, chicken, cookies. And that’s just the food. Cards, emails, texts and prayers came our way. All a blessing of being in community; in my case, our church, our village, our family. I reflect on this as we approach the upcoming holiday. Independence Day celebrates a declaration of the colonists intent to separate from the British monarchy, America’s first “No Kings” Act.

Let this essay be my personal intent to rename the Fourth of July as “Inter-dependence Day”.

The dictionary defines independence, like this : “not requiring or relying on something else, not looking to others for guidance in conduct and not requiring or relying on others for care.” It  sounds pretty negative, doesn’t it? And very lonely. If it means pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, what happens, then, to the folks who don’t have bootstraps, let alone boots? Cameron Trimble in her excellent online blog “Piloting Faith” puts it this way: “If there is to be a future worth living into, we must shift from Me to We.” (June 2)

Every advance in society, every step towards civil and individual liberties has occurred as a result of collective action.  Margaret Mead sensed this when she wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Mothers out Front. Citizens Climate Lobby. LGBTQA+ civil rights. No Kings. These are but a few examples of citizen-initiated movements sweeping our country right now. They are movements that survive, that thrive due to inter-dependence. Indeed, independence, defined as “going it alone,” can be quite dangerous.

With that in mind, I return once again to a favorite children’s book:  Swimmy, by Leo Lionni.  Swimmy’s story tells us that independence can get us in big trouble.

Swimmy is a little black fish with a big idea. When all his fish friends were eaten by a big tuna, Swimmy was “scared, lonely, and very sad.”  Then one day, he saw, hidden in the rocks, a school of little red fish. “Let’s go out and play and SEE things!” he said.  But the little fish were too scared. So Swimmy thought and thought and suddenly he said, “I have it!  We are going to swim all together like the biggest fish in the sea!” He taught them to swim together, each in its own place and when they had learned to swim like one giant fish, he said, “I’ll be the eye.”

Swimmy and his buddies became stronger, more confident and safer when they teamed up and travelled deep waters and shallow pools together.

So it is that, as a community, we can do more, be more, risk more, know and believe more when we do it together.  As a woman of faith, my go-to example is the way the church functions.  There are teachers and preachers, stewards of the building, visitors to the sick, advocates for justice.  No one of us can do it all, but together we can do a lot. The same is true, or should be true, for most human institutions, whether a local school board, a corporation, or a nation.

Which begs the question, would our nation have survived and, more to the point; will it continue to do so when it appears that the foundation of America’s fragile democracy is teetering on the brink of collapse? A house divided, Lincoln declared, cannot stand. It will not stand if we fail to link arms, join the chorus, team up and travel deep waters and shallow pools together, like Swimmy and friends. For there is no doubt that Swimmy would have been gobbled up long ago if he had, independently, swum away by himself.